Safety sensors and other products with functional safety according to EN 61508 have to be designed and comprehensively configured to meet the respective requirements of an application, the requirements on the part of a customer, as well as the relevant applicable norms and guidelines. For contactlessly operating protective devices for ensuring the safety of machines, such as for example safety light gratings or safety light barriers, the parameters to be set in the configuring procedure are very multifarious and complicated. In order to guarantee and ensure a correct configuration of the parameters to be set in a product used in  connection with operational safety, a visible and recognizable acknowledgement or feedback of the set parameters is necessary so as to be able to avoid an incorrect configuration. A direct and immediate setting of the configuration on the safety-relevant device and also a setting of the configuration via a portable operating device is in this connection not very user-friendly, and in particular the acknowledgement and feedback for checking the setting is not assured. This type of configuration therefore conceals the danger of an incorrect parameterization. Also, there is no verification of the configuration data in the form of a printout or data record, which is desirable as regards the quality management aspect.
In the field of industrial automation a configuration method is known, in which here the configuration and parameterization is generally implemented via a project-related and object-oriented tree structure. In this case the components and modules are incorporated into the project hierarchy structure and processed similar to the case of an object-oriented programming. The configuration and setting of the individual components and modules has to be carried out by a skilled person who on the one hand is conversant with the nature of the configuration and on the other hand has the necessary knowledge to solve the safety-relevant application. In this type of configuration there is no user-guided control of the user by software employed for configuration purposes. The omission of individual configuration steps can lead to an incorrect functioning of the safety application. To employ such a method the user must have the necessary specialist knowledge in order to carry out a configuration. Furthermore, an operator control unit that is used to implement the method is not able when connected to a corresponding product, such as for example to a safety sensor, safety light grating or to similar  safety-relevant devices, to display and implement an automatic sensor recognition. A user therefore has to carry out manually on the operator control unit each type of setting in relation to the product to be connected, after the components of the product have likewise been manually added to the corresponding software. Furthermore there is no direct visible acknowledgement of the implemented or altered configuration of the product, which means that a user is not able to control or check instantaneously after implementing the configuration, the effects thereby produced on the product, such as for example the safety sensor.
As already mentioned, the hitherto known methods are not user-friendly, and apart from this there is no direct acknowledgement or direct feedback of the actually executed settings and current functioning of the sensor. In particular, in this case it is not possible with safety light gratings to visualize the individual beams of the light grating so as to be able to control and appropriately alter and adjust their intensity. A direct feedback is not provided.